I might as well just wear a kilt for a living

Sometime while either mowing the lawn or trying on a kilt this weekend, I had a revelation.

Sure, I like blogging. It's like talking to myself, but in a way that makes you me seem less nuts. Sort of. But it is what blogging has meant for me and my fellow scribes that has me worried.

Newspapers, in large part to the Internet (especially the seemingly benign yet actually Satanic Craig Newmark of Craigslist fame) - and their own failure to figure out a new business model - are on falling into the tar pits like West Coast dinosaurs.

They are all trying to go multimedia, building Web pages with all sorts of bells and whistles - audio, video, message boards - essentially everything but porn. But give it time.

What this has meant for journalists is more and more typing for stagnant pay - the workload increased not only because of depleted staffs but because many are now required to keep blogs.

Which means you are almost literally tethered to your laptop. How you are supposed to find time to actually develop any story - well, who has time for that anymore? Instant news, just add water.

And let's be honest. Nobody should have that much to say/write about in one day. It's as if the model is my Mom - who can talk your ear off when she is in the mood, giving you all the details, down to the number of buttons on the dresses worn by the bridesmaids at my oldest cousin's wedding. My Mom, crossed with those blowhard pundits on cable and radio and the Net who say stupid things all the time in part because they have no time to think, and in many cases thinking would just make their empty heads explode.

I imagine the weekend I just had would have been a lot less fun if I would have had to give instant updates to a virtual features desk. I'd try on the kilt at the Highland Games, then have to post a picture, then write about what it felt like to have a breeze blowing up my yahoo. Then I would spill expensive Scotch on my PDA - right after I set up an online poll about if I should buy the all black kilt or the Hamilton gray one.

At the Taste of Randolph Street, I would have had to sample foods and make video of all the dopes who brought their dogs to a crowded fest.Do canines enjoy the country-tinged college rock of the Drive-By Truckers? Or are they secretly hoping to break into the Amish Chicken Products office off Lake Street on the way home? And who the hell buys a Great Dane and lives in the heart of a big city?

Of course, I would have to make this all "cute" because the marketing department tells us at stories about cute dogs will get hits for the Web site. Or I could have opted for the fear factor - as in, "How afraid of these dogs should you be?" or "How safe is your pet at a street fair? Could Fido get food poisoning?"

All of which has been a meandering way to make this point: Who the hell has time to look up stories about doggies at festivals online? Who has the time to look up any of this extra super bonus content?

People tell us they don't have time to look at an actual newspaper anymore, but here we go, putting even more sentences out into the world, but on the Internet.

What people do seem to have time for, apparently, is screwing off at work. When else are they doing all this surfing? Over dinner? In the car? At the kid's soccer practice?

Nah, between spread sheets and memos come incessant peeks at e-mail, shopping, looking for dates, Facebooks, trivia quizzes, iTunes, YouTube videos and job searches. We're hoping people might just take a look at the news, even beyond what the Google, Yahoo, AOL and Comcast pages are offering. I mean, we have cool videos, too - just like YouTube and all that implies.

So my job now is to encourage you to be less productive at your job so that I can still have a job. Either way, we're all spending way too much time staring at computer screens.

On "Kung Fu Panda" and identifying your own superpowers

So I took my niece and nephew to see "Kung Fu Panda" the other weekend.

You gotta love a movie where the hero is overweight and affable - and where he gets his motivation during training from food.

Plus, Po the Panda reminded me of a couple of my friends - though they are not as heroic as he is, as far as I know. I mean, they could have secret lives, costumes and caves. One of them took martial arts lessons for awhile. But I don't think either of my buddies makes the kind of money it seems you need for that lifestyle.

The movie also reminded me of my own slothfulness as I once toyed with writing a story about a round, divorced accountant who lives with his young daughter who can turn himself into a human bowling ball. Hey, it's what a fat guy could do. He discovers his super power one night after visiting a Dairy Queen. Did the power come from a Blizzard? Who knows? Anyway, on the way home (he walks to Dairy Queen for exercise), he sees some thugs picking on, then rolling a chubby kid. He chases them down the trail, and at first he is winded. His anger builds when the punks call him a fat ass, so he continues the pursuit, trips on something, but instead of falling he rolls, then rolls, then rolls, gaining speed then bowling over the bad guys.

At first, like all heroes, he keeps his identity secret. But eventually his daughter finds out. At first she is embarrassed, because he dad isn't a hottie like the other superheroes, but porky. But she comes to accept him for what he is and becomes his sidekick, The Spare. He could be called 10 Pin. Or The Striker.

Kung Fu Panda also made me hungry for Chinese food - though there are fine Chinese places, there are no buns or noodle shops to be found near my suburb. Panda Express does not count.

I also wondered if I could parlay any of my talents into being the inspiration for a comic book, then a movie based on that comic book, preferably a Pixar picture.

Sometimes I feel invisible, but who doesn't? And other times people say I look like somebody they claim to know who isn't me. Not hard to believe, as beardless, I was just another overweight, balding middle aged suburban guy, and with the beard I look like every eighth guy you see at a baseball game or a bar. Sometimes people forget I was at an event with them. I could be Camouflage, or just Camo for short.

I can eat and drink really fast. This blog offers proof of my pie eating prowess. And last weekend I took two of three rounds in downing shots called Irish Car Bombs. That could make me Snarfer, but I am not exactly sure how that could help humanity, especially with a looming food shortage.

I am pretty good at making up rumors. One I wanted to spread: If elected, Hillary Clinton would have required men to be implanted with GPS chips upon being granted a wedding license. But this skill would just make me Karl Rove.

I did recently save the lives of my coworkers. A suit was giving an inspirational talk that went on for more than a half hour when I noticed the chafing dishes of food behind him were starting to smoke and boil over. No one else made a move, but as the boss man continued to inspire, I bravely walked behind him and put the lids back on the Sterno cans, slightly burning my thumb in the process, but ultimately preventing the building from burning - or at the very least the barbecue sauce from carmelizing.

Then there was the water cooler being broke for three weeks. Finally I took it upon myself to call the 800 number on the side of it to get the cooler fixed. Turns out we were waiting for corporate channels to be cleared.

And there was the time a guy in the office couldn't find a phone number so I Googled the name for him and found it on a white pages and a people finder site. Or the young woman whose phone didn't work for a month - I went in the back room, from the part of the building where they just laid off a half dozen folks, and swapped hers out with one of those recently orphaned.

Hmm, I could be Common Sense. But that's a name of a rapper. And, while common sense is indeed in short supply, I sometimes don't display much of said behavior, myself.

So I am still thinking. You do the same - what would your heroic power be?

Strangers in the Night: My Parents' 50th Wedding Anniversary

Going to mass was what my parents wanted to do for their 50th wedding anniversary. Though I am not one for ceremonies and have long lapsed in my faith, once I saw the inside of St. Francis of Assisi Roman Catholic Church in Incline Village, I understood. The windows behind the altar offer a view of Lake Tahoe that makes it easy to believe in God.

But my folks were late for the mass.

Blame it on the cable guy. They didn't want to leave him alone in the house where they are staying for the summer, a home very graciously lent to them by my brother in law and sister. It allows them to be less than 10 minutes away from their grandchildren - and gives my brother, with whom they live a good part of the year in the Bay Area, a breather for a few months.

Me, I am typically thousands of miles away in the Chicago suburbs (the one who stayed behind) but was there for the occasion, a surprise visitor there in the pew waiting as they sheepishly ambled into the 5-minute-old service.

The priest introduced Bob and Louise during his homily - a sermon which also included a snippet of Garth Brook's "Friends in Low Places." (Hey, the theme of the service was Jesus hanging out with the likes of tax collectors and His call for mercy and forgiveness. And the Catholics have to compete with those multimedia megachurches.)

"It's more like 500 years for her. She deserves a medal for putting up with me," my dad said. That got laughs, which just encouraged him. So when the priest asked him how they met, my dad told of how my mom was supposed to be a friends date. That friend went on to be a priest. So did the friend's brother.

"They were the smart ones," quipped my dad. More laughs.

Then my parents hugged, and the parishioners applauded, maybe just like they did when my folks married at a church on the South Side of Chicago, St. John's in the Roseland neighborhood if I am not mistaken. There were less than 50 people in attendance that day in the late 1950s.

Apparently my mom's side of the family wasn't too keen on their Lithuanian daughter marrying an Irish guy. My dad was skinnier and nerdier than Buddy Holly, just out of the Army and had no college degree. My mom worked for lawyers. Jewish lawyers, which, as we all know, are the best by their nature. So the only part of her family that came to the wedding was my mom's mom and her uncle, who gave her away. Her dad didn't attend the wedding of his own child.

There are remnants of that kind of thinking in Chicago, where to this day your ethnicity frequently is included in the adjectives used to describe you, an outsider - as in, "Have you met the bald Irish guy?"

Ah, the tribal nature of Chicago, one of the obstacles overcome allowing me (and then my sister and brother) to eventually come into being, me, that bundle of joy with the bright blue eyes in the red vest and bow tie in the picture I have, the smart one who could read a newspaper by the time he was 4. (Sometimes I think I peaked really, really early.)

But from this gene pool I swam:

My dad's dad looked a bit like an Irish Nat King Cole and was known to be the life of the party - and all the good and bad things that encompassed. Sure, he could sing and play a tune on the piano by ear and crack wise. But he couldn't hold any job - and when he did he would scheme things, like bootlegging cigarettes when he worked for the Chicago Park District (Some things about Chicago never, ever change - which is to say, if only my grandpa befriended a Daley.)

So my dad, his two brothers and their parents wound up living with relatives. My grandfather Bill was raised by relatives himself, his own parents in Pittsburgh apparently too poor to care for him. Short and dark, he looked nothing like his portly brother, with whom he had little to do. I only know this from pictures from my folks' wedding album that my brother in law put into a DVD-style slide show.

Still, what I do remember of my dad's father is, indeed someone who could light up a room, who would play tag in a graveyard, and let you run under the hose on a hot day in your underwear and who took you to the "beer store" on the corner. And he died of cancer when I was a small boy - my first tears of real sorrow.

And my other grandfather - well, Joe he came from Lithuania to escape the Bolsheviks. He headed to the States, a brother to South America. A quiet man, he did once chop up a piano because my mother didn't play it any more. And the first few times my dad called my mom, Joe told him she didn't live there.

Still, despite me being half Irish, he loved to feed me smoked fish and rolls slathered in sour cream and listen to baseball games with me in the back of the small grocery store he and my grandmother owned and lived above. And he would take my sister and I on adventures to get the food they sold at their store. That's not to mention the first taste of violent crime I had when their store was robbed at closing time. This was before 9-11 but I ran to call the police - but being scared, forgot the address.

Those and myriad memories swirled about in my head during the mass, the family history on rewind, then fast forward - the visits to the cemetery with "aunts" who lived with us and our cousins; the chocolate milk, potato chip and ham sandwich lunches at Catholic grade school; the "nervous breakdowns" suffered by both grandmothers; the floor hockey in the basement at my cousins; the aluminum Christmas tree; the vacations in the station wagon; the arguments; the Christmas without my father.

I wished my folks would write their versions of the family stories stories down instead of reading suspense novels or doing word search puzzles. How did they fall in love? It still seems a mystery.

As I pondered, the mass went along. I held hands with strangers at the appointed time just before Holy Communion, then shook hands with those around me - the silly part of the modern mass, but also the part I like best, because silly is good and so are awkward greetings because in church they usually at least bring a sheepish smile.

Before the mass let out, the priest asked any visitors to stand up and introduce themselves. Inspired by another couple from Chicago, my dad and mom stood once more. And my dad spoke again telling all how he was staying for the summer to torture his grandchildren. The congregation laughed again. If I were a teen I would have found it all so very embarrassing. Instead I was hoping it would inspire my father to get off his ass and get involved in a place where they haven't heard all his jokes yet, where he could make new friends and be the life of the party - where, like happened at church, someone came up to him and started talking to him just because he was from Chicago, too, which is the Chicago way.

In the restaurant that night where we celebrated, there was a table filled with young women in purple, pink and orange wigs - a bachelorette party just beginning, someone else embarking on her own matrimonial voyage.

I should have introduced this bride to be to my parents. But I was in quiet man mode, all this past somehow tying my tongue, sad and smoky Sinatra songs playing on the iPod in my brain.